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Axslav discusses life as an analyst

The former EG and current i7 player spoke to D-eSports about Starcraft, his career, and his role as an analyst for MLG.
Nick “Axslav” Ranish is a man of many talents. Formerly a high level Warcraft III player, he made the obvious switch to Starcraft 2 to play for EG. But after mediocre results, the North American powerhouse let him go. From there he joined Reign, but was unable to stay there for long either. "After a few months in Reign the team funding dried up and I went to Infinity Seven," said Ranish. "I knew Infinity Seven’s owner Jingna from earlier events and felt the team would be a good fit for me."

Nowadays, Axlsav is still playing and competing regularly, but you're more likely to see him on-stream as an analyst for MLG. "Doing the analysis for such great players was really fun," he said. "I must be doing well enough with it because they keep asking me back." Still, he clearly misses playing in the events and will be stepping back into the action soon: "I will be competing at MLG Raleigh next, and after that I have a couple of events that might come up but nothing set in stone." And why wouldn't he? In his eyes, the game is still fun and balanced. "Right now all the races are getting very similar results at the top level of play," he said of the current meta game. "I think that as terran players start to learn many of the mechanics they never had to master under previous patches [...] terran might start to pull ahead a tiny bit."

For the former-EG player, life in a minnow team like i7 has its ups and downs. "Without major sponsors, the leadership of Infinity Seven is focused more on players instead of sponsors," he told D-eSports. "It can be a positive thing, but also means that it is much harder to attend tournaments and recruit players."

Michael "Zechs" Radford is an esports veteran and has been writing about professional gaming for longer than he cares to remember. He currently lives in Leeds and is hoping his upcoming offspring will be talented enough to play esports professionally rather than just write about other people doing it.